This week, I presented our Project Proposal to the other capstone teams and faculty. I spent ~2 hours preparing for the presentation to ensure we met all the needed requirements in the slide show, and to ensure that I could spend my time interacting with the audience instead of reading just off the slides. After presenting the proposal, I spent the rest of the week doing research into different sensors we could use in the chair. I was able to narrow it down to two types of sensors: Load Cells and Flexible Force Sensors. After putting some more thought into the overall integration, I think that using flexible force sensors might be better in the long run to meet the user requirements of not impeding the user during their work, as they will not be as obtrusive on the chair. I hope this upcoming Monday to finish talking it through with the team and order the parts necessary to begin creating a barebones pressure mat and testing it.
My progress is on schedule. This week, I wanted to complete research into parts for the pressure sensors so they could be ordered on Monday when our team next meets.
In the next week, I hope to create a much more in depth design of the chairs sensors. I hope to create a document that details exactly how the pressure sensors will be connected to the raspberry pi, and begin working on the code in order to create the averages for weight distribution on the chair.